You walk into a supermarket with a grocery list full of
functional items: rice, dal, napkins. But before long, you find yourself buying
all kinds of things you never intended: chocolates, chips and biscuits with
cream that you had never seen before that day. You return home laden with twice
as many items as you had intended to buy.
Your purchases aren’t merely coincidences or whims. In fact,
the shelves of supermarkets are carefully designed to attract the attention of
customers and maximize sales.
“Retail is a vast area with carefully analyzed principles of
its own,” says Hemanta Dangal, Operations Manager at Saleways Department Store.
Areas in a supermarket are categorized as prime locations,
or dead areas, according to the footfall they get. For example, the area just
in front of the customers when they enter the store is a prime location that
every visitor is bound to see. So, in this area are stored fast moving
consumable goods like chocolates and chips. In the dead areas are stored
slow-moving items which customers need only once in a while, like soaps,
shampoos, etc.
And it just so happens that the fast-moving items are the
ones you don’t necessarily need, and may not even buy unless their attractive
display entices you.
Bhatbhateni Supermarket and Departmental Store at Pulchowk
has a large display box full of chips and nachos that stretches across several
counters.
“Every customer is bound to look at this box,” says Panu
Paudel, Operations Manager at Bhatbhateni Supermarket and Departmental Store.
“25-30% of purchases at supermarkets are unplanned, and it’s displays like
these that incite such unplanned purchases.”
Many shoppers confess to falling for these clever
arrangements. Press Giri, 22, is a student who often shops there. There she can
buy everything she needs at one place, and she can find items that she cannot
find at her corner store. But she also admits that she gets swayed by the items
on display and often ends up with more than her original list.
The prime area is a location of constant attention and
experimentation. In summer, juices and cold drinks may be placed near the
entrance, while in winter it is tea, coffees and hot chocolates. Festival
offers are also placed near the entrance for the same reason. The sale of items
at prime location is unfailingly high.
Apart from an item’s location in the store, its visibility
on a particular shelf is also of paramount importance. The amount of shelf
space occupied by a brand is directly proportional to its sale. Dangal confirms
that no visibility means no sales. Brands prefer that their products be placed
at eye-level.
“Eye-level is that where you don’t have to bend or stretch
in any way to get a product,” informs Dangal, “and without a doubt, the items
displayed at eye level get more customer interest than items stored elsewhere.
This is reflected in the sales.”
While the location of products in a store is decided by the
supermarkets based on pre-existing retail-store models, individual brands
bargain for shelf space and level. They may offer money or discount in exchange
for space at eye-level or bulk space at prime location. Paudel related that
since people are more likely to buy a single-serve item than a family-sized
unit, they often put the smaller unit of the same brand at eye-level.
There are many other strategies used to boost sales at
supermarkets. Paudel informed that they put new items at prime locations so
that customers are attracted to products that they may not have heard of
otherwise. Also, little items like chewing gum that line the counter are there
because “people buy them just because they see them.” In a sense, when you
arrive at the counter and see little knickknacks, you continue to buy even
after you have officially finished your shopping.
Intangible factors like music and wall colors are also
carefully chosen to create the desired ambience.
“These factors don’t necessarily increase sales, but they
help create a conducive shopping environment,” says Dangal.
Saleways has experimented on a range of different music:
from Rock to Hip Hop to folk. After they received complaints from customers who
didn’t like one genre or another, they have stuck to playing track music. This
has created a soothing environment.
Sunila Shrestha, Branch Manager of the Pulchowk branch of
Bhatbhateni Supermarket and Departmental Store, informed that they continue to
experiment with music during special occasions, for example, by playing
festival-specific music and songs. She believes this puts customers in a
festive mood.
A lot of a supermarket’s sales also depend on the guaranteed
customer footfalls it gets. Dangal, who has been in retail business for 15
years in Nepal and abroad, is in a position to compare supermarket culture
across countries. In countries where supermarkets are the only way of shopping,
it is common to have necessities like milk stored at the back of the
supermarket. Customers who need milk have no option but to go to the
supermarket, cross all the aisles, and reach the dead area.
“The logic of putting necessities at the back is that
customers can make a round and see other things the store has to offer,” Dangal
expounded.
In Nepal, we are not in the habit of getting daily
necessities like milk from departmental stores, so placing milk at the back
serves little purpose. In fact, Dangal informs that hiding necessities in dead
areas often does not work, because people come in for a short while, have a
glance, and go back disappointed.
“A supermarket is a place where you can find everything,” he
says, “but because supermarket culture is not so developed in Nepal yet,
sometimes people don’t bother to check out the entire store.”
Saleways had experimented with keeping essential groceries
like rice, beans, etc in a different room. But after customers turned away,
they put these items directly to the right of the entrance. Their sales rose by
200%. Since then, their prime location contains a mix of necessities like
groceries and fast-moving consumer items like chips and chocolates.
“At the end of the day, it’s the customers who decide the
display, not the display that decides the customers,” says Dangal. If a store
has a certain number of guaranteed footfalls, it can put its products at any
inconvenient place and expect customers to find it. But if the number of
customers is not guaranteed, it must do all it can to attract new customers by
contouring the display to suit their needs.
With increasing supermarket culture where people have even
begun to prefer supermarkets to corner stores, the day is not far in Nepal too
where the display decides the customers and not the other way around.
Some common
advertising strategies
Emotions
Many advertisements link their product with some emotion:
happiness, fun, relief from fear, beauty, etc. Viewers have been known to connect
most easily to these kinds of advertisements. This strategy works on any kind
of product.
Humor
A small section of advertisements use humor to get across to
their audience. Humor can be tricky, because what one person finds funny can be offensive to others. Hence, this
strategy is best suited for fast moving consumable goods (FMCG) products, where
humor is used to create a fun association with the product. Humor is used less
often in products that require serious investment or analytical decisions.
Information
Facts, figures and statistics are likely to communicate to
consumers if the products in question are important logical investments, or
those that have complicated technical aspects. Statistics are often combined
with other approaches, like emotions, to take off their dry edge and make them
more relatable.
Published in Republica on July 11
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